Educational Game

Playing means movement, spontaneity, improvement, research, communication. Playing is free expression of intelligence, ability, creative energy, casuality. Playing is life, is have fun, is learning for interest, for curiosity, for imitation. Playing is live “here and now” with creativity and extemporariness, without a rigid development of activities and without space and temporal restrictions, only those of game.

Playing is so an art where people enjoy themselves and they learn to know from experience. For example, playing allows to understand spontaneously the cases rules, movements, jokes and paradoxes.

Therefore, Playing, is a natural and joyful activity, but also involves a deep physycal partecipation, emotional and intellectual. This different level of internal partecipation allows to recognize if an activity is a simple game or an hobby. Playing excites and involves who takes part in it, while hobby (free time) allows also a rest and a deactivation of physical and psychical energies.

Playing is therefore a serious engagement, which involves the whole character of every participant (a typical expression is: “don’t joke, we’re playing”)

Game is a competition or a friendly collaboration in a race that prove abilities and participant’s skills. Game is an educational moment, a social activity, an exchange of psycological and authentic relationships. Game is “making out”, is a mental conscious illusion, is a simulation of reality (for example: “Now we play at being mother and father, or “now I am the doctor and you are sick”) or is an ipothetycal mental imagination that turns around a concept, an idea, an argument.

Playing means learning to understand how every part and every mechanism articulates, thus it means learn to adapt and to know the reality of every point of view (“the game of parts”). Playing is to bring oneself into question (typical expression is “to bring oneself into play”); playing is transforming oneself and imagine reality in relation to the game’s rule.

Therefore is important that every educator (parent, teacher, social operators), learn to play, know customs/ features/ rules/ functions/ of Game as Educational Methodology and is able to realize it in different kind of games.